Word: mullah
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...latest victory in the war on terrorism took place on the night of May 11 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence had tracked Mullah Dadullah, thought to be the Taliban's top guerrilla commander, to a location near the border with Pakistan. By all accounts, what happened next was a model of surgical counterterrorism. When it was over, the Americans delivered Dadullah's corpse to Afghan authorities, who draped it in hot-pink sheets and displayed it for photographers in Kandahar, a ghoulish ritual that now attends the killing of any high-value terrorist target...
...fact that he had to be buried in a secret location underscored the importance of Mullah Dadullah to the Afghan insurgency. Afghan authorities announced Monday that the Taliban's top military commander, slain in a weekend operation led by U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan, had been laid to rest in secret lest his burial site become a rallying point for resistance. They, together with NATO officials, hailed his death as a critical blow to a spiraling Taliban insurgency, and it will certainly be a welcome victory for a coalition that has been losing support as a result of the mounting...
...Iraq insurgency. A Taliban spokesman on Monday hailed Dadullah as a martyr, announcing that his brother had been appointed to take his place. "This is not going to slow down the Taliban jihad," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone reading a statement attributed to the movement's fugitive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. That remains to be proved in the field, but the Iraq experience has conditioned Western officials to lower expectations arising from the elimination of even key insurgent leaders...
...separate interview, a clearly "harder" Taliban reverses Meerza's statistics. Mullah Rahmatullah says "95% are supporting [Mullah Omar, the fugitive founder of the Taliban]; 5% are soft Taliban and will not fight." Rahmatullah commands about 10 men, many of whom live with their families in Pakistan. "We have several training camps there and we receive everything from them: money, equipment, weapons. In Baluchistan, we have three camps of Taliban and there are other places as well." He complains, "Religious people no longer have power in Afghanistan. This is not the case in Pakistan...
...Meanwhile, Mullah Noor Ahmad, a Taliban commander of 15 fighters and an admirer of Mullah Omar from the beginning, makes no excuses for the Taliban's tactics, including suicide attacks. "They have proven very useful," he says. "Very effective... Any method that kills the enemy is acceptable. This allows us to spend money, for example, to fight face to face or from a distance, or even fight with the pen. Anything in order to win the war. And if I am killed, I will go to paradise." He adds, "The Taliban will hit anyone who is working with the coalition...